Code Name Princess
by quicksilversquared
Summary: When Plagg adds the nickname "Princess" to Marinette's contact on Adrien's phone, it doesn't take long for Nino to find out. Naturally, he has to find out who this "Princess" is. And of course he has to tease Adrien about it. Mercilessly.


At the start of their partnership, Adrien found himself having to change his phone password weekly to keep Plagg from screwing with his phone during the school day. He didn't particularly trust the mischievous kwami with his phone, especially when most of the contacts he had punched into his phone were people with very little sense of humor. He couldn't afford to have them suddenly bombarded with weird texts that Plagg had decided to send for their amusement.

Still, as the weeks turned into months, Adrien gradually ran out of passwords to use. He was locking himself out of his own phone more and more often. Plagg usually snickered at his misfortune before helpfully hacking into the phone for Adrien.

So Adrien finally gave up. Maybe when he traded in his phone next time he could get one that could use his fingerprint in place of a password, but changing his password up so often was a lost cause for now. Plagg knew him well enough to know that he couldn't send weird texts off to random people for fun without risking some sort of backlash for Adrien (and no matter how much the kwami sometimes seemed to delight in embarrassing Adrien, he definitely didn't want Adrien in actual trouble), so he found other things on Adrien's phone to amuse himself with. It only became a problem when Adrien forgot to turn the volume all the way off or when he didn't bring along a charger. On more than one occasion Adrien found his battery drained completely when he opened his bag to text the Gorilla or Nathalie.

Unsurprisingly, he had gotten in trouble each time that happened. Plagg had managed to look moderately contrite for a full minute every time before asking for his cheese.

Still, Plagg hadn't gotten up to as much trouble as Adrien would have expected with his phone, so he stopped worrying about it so much.

Which meant that when he handed his phone over to Nino, he hadn't checked it for anything strange first.

Nino had tagged along to one of Adrien's photoshoots that day, since the two boys were supposed to be working on a project together and Adrien didn't know when the shoot was supposed to end. As the shoot dragged on, Nino had run his battery into the ground playing games on his phone. He hadn't brought his charger along, and Adrien's charger didn't work in Nino's phone. Adrien didn't even hesitate before unlocking his own phone and tossing it over to Nino before returning to the set for yet another round of photographs.

While he waited, Nino explored Adrien's phone. He checked out the apps and games (why Adrien had several cat-themed games on his phone, he didn't know), scrolled through the photographs (he was in most of them), looked at the calendar (it was stuffed full of assignment due dates, photoshoots, test dates, and what looked like his father's travelling schedule) before Nino decided to see how many people Adrien had in his contacts.

And that was where it got interesting.

Quite a few of the contacts had a picture next to them. Some were flattering photos, while others were not. More than a handful had interesting nicknames. Nathalie had been nicknamed _The Dragon Lady_. Chloe, by the looks of it, had been christened _The Wicked Witch of the West_. Alya had been nicknamed _Ladyblogger_ and Nino himself was named _Mr. Beats_.

Further down the list, Nino found a photoless contact simply named _Princess_. He stopped dead, staring at the number.

 _Huh?_ Did Adrien have a crush on someone? He'd never mentioned anyone, the sly dog.

Since there was no picture to go with the name, Nino clicked on it. A number from the Paris area popped up.

That was no help. It could be _anyone_.

Nino picked up his own phone, turning it back on and ignoring the low battery light. As long as he turned off all of his applications and Wi-Fi, it would last long enough to check this Princess' number against his own contact list. A couple swipes of his finger turned his contact list into a series of phone numbers, and Nino quickly started scrolling down to see if any of his contacts had the same number as this _Princess_.

One minute and twenty-two seconds later, he found it. Another click, and Marinette's face flashed up on his screen.

 _No way_.

Nino choked back a laugh as he double-checked the numbers. Yup, they definitely matched.

Adrien had a _lot_ of explaining to do.

* * *

"So, I happened to notice a contact named _Princess_ on your phone," Nino said casually as Adrien shoveled a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. It would forever be a mystery to him how Adrien ate _so. damn. much_. but stayed as thin as a rail. The blonde boy choked on his food, eyes bulging out as he struggled to swallow the giant bite he had taken. "I didn't know you had a crush on someone."

"I- no- that's- it's an inside joke," Adrien stammered out. A faint blush was starting to make its way up his cheeks. He muttered something under his breath. All Nino could make out was something about a plague. Mentally shrugging, he decided to ignore it. Maybe it was some sort of not-swearing Adrien had picked up while he was homeschooled. It wasn't the first time Adrien had said something weird and besides, Nino had more interesting things to bug his best friend about. Like the nickname.

Nino grinned. "I didn't know you had inside jokes with Marinette."

Adrien's cheeks went redder. "It- it was just something I said once, and I thought it would be funny to put it on my phone."

One of Nino's eyebrows rose. "You called Marinette 'princess' once? How did she react to that?" It was no secret that Marinette had a crush on Adrien, even if she could talk to him relatively normally now. But if he was calling her princess… ooh, she had probably gone the approximate shade of a tomato. Kind of like what Adrien looked like now. Nino would have paid good money to have been there.

"Not to her face!" Adrien spluttered out in a rush. "It was- oh, never mind. It wouldn't make sense without context. A lot of context. Which would be really hard to explain."

"Uh-huh." Nino was having far too much fun with this. "Would Alya understand this inside joke requiring context?"

He didn't even know it was possible for Adrien's face to go this color, red and white all at the same time. "No! No, that's- it's an inside joke with someone else. Who you don't know. And probably haven't met."

Nino frowned at that, an unwelcome thought niggling at his mind. It wouldn't be like Adrien, but he had to be sure… "Adrien, you weren't making fun of Marinette when you called her a princess, right?" Poor, poor Marinette if that was the case. It hadn't taken Nino long to figure out that Adrien's treasured scarf that he thought was from his father was actually from Marinette, and that Marinette had a habit of slipping cookies into Adrien's bag whenever he mentioned a particularly exhausting photo shoot.

Adrien looked shocked and more than a little offended. "Of course not! I'd never!"

With a smirk, Nino leaned back in his chair and changed the subject. But Adrien could tell from his expression that his friend hadn't dropped the topic for good yet.

Oh, no. If Adrien wasn't going to explain, Nino was going to take the nickname and _run_ with it.

* * *

As soon as Nino left that night, Adrien pounced on his phone and started scrolling through his contacts, putting the names back to normal. Plagg snickered from his spot on the desk, where he was munching cheese and delighting in the embarrassment he had caused Adrien.

"I don't know where you even got that nickname," Adrien muttered as he changed Marinette's name back to normal. "She's not my girlfriend."

"But you called her Princess during the Evillustrator attack," Plagg sing-songed before swallowing a slice of cheese whole. He burped. "You're just lucky that I didn't put a whole line of hearts after her name. At least you could tell Nino that it was a joke."

"Yeah, and now he thinks that I talk about Marinette behind her back!" Part of him was upset that Nino would ever think that he would do something like that, but the other part of him could tell that an inside joke with that sort of nickname could easily turn mocking.

He hadn't been mocking Marinette when he called her Princess, not at all. He had just gotten a little carried away with the whole "the knight rescues the princess" and at any rate, Marinette would make a fantastic princess. She was a natural leader as Class President, she was kind and helpful to their classmates, she was brave (he couldn't imagine most of their classmates agreeing to be bait for an akuma attack like she had), and she was diplomatic, even when Chloe was trying to make it hard for her. Of course, he couldn't tell Nino that because he would misinterpret it as Adrien having a crush on Marinette and then, before he could do anything at all, he would probably find Nino and Alya conspiring against him and Marinette and trying to throw the two of them together. Even if Adrien reminded Nino that he was in love with Ladybug, not Marinette, Nino probably wouldn't listen. He still believed that Adrien's so-called 'love' was nothing more than a really, _really_ big celebrity crush.

Since he didn't want to raise any suspicion, Adrien couldn't even defend himself against such a label.

"Do you think Nino would accept bribes to never mention it again to anyone?" Adrien asked Plagg as he paced back and forth across his room. Given how large his room was, he was actually getting a fairly respectable walk in. "I can't have Alya finding out, she would _never_ drop it..."

As he expected, Plagg said nothing. Apparently the cheese rinds Adrien had scavenged from the kitchen garbage were more interesting than Adrien himself and the problems that Plagg had caused for him.

"Maybe he'll have forgotten it by tomorrow," Adrien told himself hopefully. "Surely there's a whole lot more Nino has to think about... right?"

* * *

Nino had not forgotten.

"Oh, look, your princess has arrived!" Nino proclaimed with a smirk as soon as they spotted Marinette crossing the street as she approached the school. She was dressed in a pretty pink dress with a floofy skirt, and never before had she looked quite as much like an actual princess. Silver embroidery worked its way across the dress in a pattern that Adrien was positive would impress even his father.

He was so intent on inspecting the design of the dress that he didn't realize how it would look to Nino. Adrien only looked back at Nino when his friend started snickering.

"You're _staring_ ," Nino sing-songed in the most irritating voice Adrien had ever heard him use.

"I was admiring her dress," Adrien protested. "I'm almost positive that it's one she designed herself. It would be rude not to admire it." Still, he couldn't stop his cheeks from turning red.

Nino only cackled and headed inside.

That was only the start. For the rest of the day, Nino went out of his way to point out Marinette wherever they went, calling her "Princess" the entire time. Alya was starting to give them weird looks, making Adrien wonder if she had heard Nino.

Hopefully she was reacting to Nino's weird behavior and Adrien's perpetually red cheeks rather than what Nino was saying.

"You can stop now," Adrien grumbled after Nino's sneak attack hiss of " _Princess!"_ had caused him to stumble and nearly fall in front of Marinette. "It's gotten old already."

Nino snickered. "I don't know, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. How often do you get to see a model lose his composure over a girl?"

"I'm not losing composure over a girl, I'm losing composure over your teasing," Adrien protested. "It's not the same thing."

Nino didn't look particularly convinced.

Plagg wasn't helping the situation at all. He was snickering along with Nino as Adrien turned red and stumbled over both his words and his own feet. Adrien wouldn't have put it past the kwami to have planned the entire thing, except it would have been too much work for the often-lazy kwami.

No, it was simply a case of dismally poor timing. Plagg wouldn't have been able to predict when Nino's phone would die and that Adrien would offer up his own phone in exchange. Besides, the kwami had been sleeping during Adrien's photoshoot.

Still, the near-constant cackling from Plagg was enough to make Adrien just a little suspicious.

* * *

"-and now my friend won't quit teasing me about it," Chat Noir moaned to Ladybug that night. He had given her as much detail as he could about his problem without giving away who he was, who his friend was, and the nickname he was having to defend. "And I can't blame Plagg for it, because then I would have to explain about Plagg and obviously I can't dothat."

Ladybug looked suspiciously like she might be trying to hide her giggles. Chat Noir sent her a betrayed look- he had thought that she, out of everyone in the world, might be able to summon up a bit of empathy for him.

"What would you have done if you were in my place?" Chat Noir pleaded as Ladybug's shoulders started to shake with her repressed mirth. "I don't want my other friends to overhear the nickname, because they'll get the wrong idea and try to set us up and the girl with the, uh, nickname is really nice and all but I'm a one-girl cat."

Ladybug finally stopped giggling long enough to think about it. "Well, you could have told your friend at the time that you weren't the one to put nicknames in."

Chat Noir raised an eyebrow at her. "And pray tell who would I say was responsible, then?"

"You said that the nickname was an inside joke with someone you work with, right?" At Chat Noir's nod, she continued. "You could have said that they snatched the phone away from you and were giving people nicknames based on what you told them about that person. It would be a little too late now to use that, though, since your friend would probably want to know why you didn't just say so in the first place."

Huh. Actually, he could probably make that work.

"You're the best!" Chat Noir exclaimed, throwing his arms around Ladybug and making the surprised girl squeak. He would have to bring her flowers if this worked, or maybe chocolates, or pastries from the Dupain-Cheng bakery.

Now he just had to get Nino to believe him.

* * *

The next day, Nino didn't tease Adrien at all during the morning. Adrien could tell his friend was up to something, though. His eyes glinted mischievously as Adrien sent a suspicious side-eye in his direction.

Nino was probably planning on waiting until Adrien dropped his guard. _Too bad for him,_ Adrien thought smugly. _That's not going to happen._

Until it did. Adrien was busy skimming through the chapter they had been assigned with Nino leaned up behind him and hissed right in his ear, "Your Princess is right over there! Why don't you go say hi?"

For a moment Adrien floundered, caught off guard. His mind blanked for a too-long moment as he simultaneously fought back the blush that had irrationally decided to appear (there was _nothing to blush about_ \- it wasn't like he was secretly harboring a crush on Marinette or anything) and tried to remember the script he had written for himself.

"You're really attached to a nickname I didn't even come up with, aren't you?" Adrien said, composing his face into his best aloof model look and raising an eyebrow at Nino. _Perfect_. He mentally patted himself on the back for his composure. _Line delivered perfectly_.

Nino spluttered, taken aback. "That you didn't even come up with?"

"I let one of the other models play with my phone recently and he made up the nicknames based on what I told him about everyone." Adrien gave the most nonchalant shrug he could. "I kinda wanted to take credit for some of the names 'cause I thought they were kinda clever, but if you're going to endlessly bug me about the _Princess_ nickname..."

Nino had the decency to look abashed before his expression got a bit suspicious. "But you said before that it was an inside joke. Methinks that someone is lying."

Adrien battled down his nerves long enough to roll his eyes. "It _was_ an inside joke of sorts. I was telling him about my friends and apparently the way I was talking about Marinette made her sound like she would make a good princess-" and oh no _please don't let Nino pick up on that_ \- "and so he said so, and I kind of agreed, and so. Yup."

Okay, that sounded better in his head.

Nino raised an eyebrow. "How did you describe Marinette, then, if someone who doesn't even know her decided she sounded like a princess?"

Adrien fidgeted. He had really been hoping Nino wouldn't ask that. "Well, I told him that she was class president and that she was really fashionable and kind." He shrugged. "And I probably mentioned some of the fights that she settled in class. I think that was really what got her the nickname."

Nino finally dropped the suspicious look on his face and laughed. "Yeah, she really has stepped up to solve problems in the class, hasn't she? She wasn't like that at all last year. She used to be really quiet and never spoke up in class. And then Alya came and I think she was the one who really got Marinette started with the standing up and speaking out."

"But she's always been kind, I bet," Adrien said. He smiled over at where Marinette was talking to Juleka and Rose. A snort from Plagg made Adrien glance away from Marinette quickly. Now was _not_ the time to be seen admiring his friend, even if it was in a strictly platonic context.

Nino shrugged. "I guess."

Adrien waited for Nino to say something else, but he didn't. Ladybug's excuse had worked wonders after all, even several days later. He felt a little bad for lying to Nino, but maybe someday after Hawkmoth was defeated he could tell Nino the truth about what had _really_ happened. Adrien smirked a bit as he pictured what Nino's face would look like if that happened. Even better would be the look on Alya's face, considering how enthusiastic she was about superheroes. It would be the best thing ever, being able to tell the moderator of the Ladyblog that he had been hiding under her nose for _months_ , possibly years. He anticipated having a lot of things thrown at his head as the news really sunk in.

Maybe Marinette could protect him from her best friend. Adrien's eyes slid back over to her as he smiled to himself. He wasn't certain what kind of reaction he would get out of her if he could reveal his secret identity, but he bet that it would be _super_ amusing. She had really been excited to meet Chat Noir during the Evillustrator attack, after all.

As the class went into Miss Bustier's room and settled into their seats, Adrien pulled out his phone and looked at his contacts. He had left most of the nicknames intact, even though they had caused so many problems. Adrien let his finger hover over Marinette's contact information. He should change it back before Nino saw it again, he knew that much- explaining _that_ away would be near-impossible.

Still, he really liked the nickname and really, there was no reason that Nino would go looking in his contacts again anytime soon. Adrien deliberated for another second before exiting out of his contacts and putting his phone away.

Despite how much trouble it had caused, Plagg really had picked a great nickname for Marinette. Adrien was keeping it.


End file.
